Taking screenshots of video?

March 21, 2005 11:23 AM

Anyone know of the best way to take screenshots of video on a PC? I notice that DVDs and mpegs and avis all seem to do a weird matte screen thing where video is projected "above" the video player on your screen, so all screengrabs are blank. There must be a hack to get a simple grab every now and then off this sort of video. Anyone ever figure this out?
posted by mathowie to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I almost posted this to AskMe after unsuccessfully Googling for the answer about 5 times over several months. I decided to google one more time and I found the answer. :)

You have to turn off hardware acceleration in Media Player.

http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000154.php
posted by agropyron at 11:34 AM on March 21, 2005

The normal way is to disable video acceleration, the particulars of which are different for each app. Then it has to draw the video the same way as everything else, and a normal screen cap will work.

Or use Media Player Classic, it has a Save Image command that works sometimes.
posted by smackfu at 11:34 AM on March 21, 2005

If you're using a Mac OS-based PC, there's Snapz Pro.
posted by AlexReynolds at 11:36 AM on March 21, 2005

See also
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 11:52 AM on March 21, 2005

Play the DVD with VLC?
posted by kindall at 12:11 PM on March 21, 2005

Most sane media players will framegrab without much trouble, but if you want to do so from outside the player, you'll need to disable video overlay. Once you know that's what the feature is called, it's easier to adjust.

Depending on operating system and application, there are a number of different ways to accomplish it. Cranking down the "video acceleration" slider in the System control panel will probably take care of it system-wide, on Windows machines.
posted by majick at 12:26 PM on March 21, 2005

Thanks, I have been wondering the same thing recently.
posted by caddis at 6:27 PM on March 21, 2005

The way I do it is to launch the video I want to get a screenshot of in windows media player, then while that's playing, launch another copy in a different player (I use media player classic) and then take a screenshot of the second media player.
posted by Savvas at 7:36 PM on March 21, 2005